Are /opt and /usr/local symlinks on Silverblue because it is an ostree image and not bootc?

Project Discussion
1

Several pieces of bootc documentation suggest that /opt and /usr/local should be regular directories, including the bootc filesystem document: Filesystem - bootc

…as well as comments in the tmpfiles config that creates the legacy /var/opt and /var/usrlocal:

$ cat /usr/lib/tmpfiles.d/rpm-ostree-0-integration-opt-usrlocal.conf
# Traditionally, /usr/local has been a link to /var/usrlocal and /opt to /var/opt.
# A new model now is to allow OSTree commit content in those directories. But
# this dropin implements the old model.

I’ve read Determine support path for RPMs that install into `/opt`, `/usr/local` etc · Issue #233 · coreos/rpm-ostree · GitHub and Enable `opt-usrlocal-overlays` by default · Issue #1681 · coreos/fedora-coreos-tracker · GitHub so I think I … mostly understand these symlinks as a legacy configuration for rpm-ostree systems.

Fedora’s current bootc images still replace /opt and /usr/local with symlinks, which makes them difficult to work with. Will future bootc images stop replacing those directories with symlinks?

2

Existing systems rely on that behavior so any changes on this front would likely require a migration path.

Thus if you want this change to happen, we need to discuss that in an issue in the Atomic Desktops tracker.

3

This is now discussed in https://forge.fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/tracker/issues/126.